Really, these are subway and sleepy time shorts, since I only read one of them on the subway. Today, I’m taking a look at a couple of No. 2 issues – Nightwing and Justice League.

Nightwing 2
Written by Tim Seely 
Art by Javier Fernandez 

In the last issue, we met Nightwing’s new mentor/partner, the Parliament of Owls member Raptor, as he joins the mysterious group to try and take it down from the inside. And in the second issue, Grayson and Raptor are tasked to complete their first mission for the Parliament.

The whole conceit of the new series is Nightwing steeling himself to do things he may not want to do as the chosen one within the Parliament of Owls, so I would have assumed he would have more of a tolerance for what he has decided he needs to do. By the end of the issue, he’s decided to quit or attack his new partner or turn against the Owls a whole bunch of times. I have no problem with Grayson showing some doubts about his new station, but that should have been taken care of already.

We also get some more interaction with Barbara Gordon, who has finally made it to Japan. Despite clutching a present for her the whole issue, things don’t seem to go well.

Writer Tim Seely did a great job with Grayson as a spy in the previous series, so I’m hoping he’s just adjusting to putting him back in the Nightwing duds. Plus, I’m a lot more interested in what happens with Babs. We’ve got a crossover with Batman and Detective Comics coming up soon, as advertised in the back of the book. So, I guess we’ll see how things go in the next few issues.

Justice League 2
Written by Bryan Hitch
Pencils by Tony S. Daniel 
Inks by Sandu Florea

It’s another alien invasion and the League is working through how best to deal with it. The bigger problem is that the League is down one of the team’s hardest hitter, with the Superman of the New 52 dead and Batman not fully trusting the newly debuted pre-Flashpoint Superman yet.

We’re definitely still building to what the real threat is during “The Extinction Machine” arc, so all we’ve seen thus far is the new threat taking over some people and an apparent plague of locusts attacking Gotham, with a few dozen new ships coming towards Earth. And Wonder Woman and Batman disagreeing on whether or not Batman should reach out to the new Superman – so I’ll assume this issue happens before the two of them went to see Superman in Clark’s first issue.

After nearly 5 years of Geoff Johns building epic tales with the League, the new tale doesn’t seem like a League story, but it should be interesting to see where Hitch goes with the Superman interaction.